A Father’s Day 
Future Forum: Guilt, Innocence, and the Death Penalty 
Free Richard Lafuente!
Did the kid from Plainview really drive his El Camino over Eddie Peltier on a North Dakota Indian reservation in 1983? Nobody on the rez thinks so, and neither will you. So why is he still in federal prison?
Connie says: I have relatives that live on the SLN reservation, I am from South Dakota, and an enrolled member of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe. Out of curiosity one day I stumbled on to Cat West’s website which also brought me here to this site. I am saddened by how our people are potrayed and sad but true, reservation life is this way. How can this go on like this for so long? Eddie’s death, I mean. It is just sad, and I feel so badly for his family, and the family of those whom are falsely accused of his death. This is 2011! We should be able to do something to solve this. And if it is due to a bigger corruption, how can this not be ignored?! It is outrageous! My heart goes out to Eddie’s family, Richard’s family and other family members who have lost because of this. I applaud Cat West for standing up for those who couldn’t and didnt have a chance to do it themselves’, Eddie and Richard, for getting thier stories out there. And to this paper for writing this story. (June 7th, 2011 at 2:30pm)
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A year and a half later, in September 1987, a panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit threw out the cases against Dwayne and five others for insufficient evidence (they were freed shortly thereafter) and ordered new trials for Richard, John, and three others charged with perjury and/or witness tampering on the grounds of prejudicial misjoinder: Trying defendants on murder and lesser charges at the same time, in an all-or-nothing fashion, had been unfair. A year later the full court split 5—5 over whether the joinder was proper; since the vote was a tie, the original trial judgment stood. There would be no new trials for the last five defendants. One of the judges called the decision a “gross miscarriage of justice.”
The Mob
I HAD MET OR TALKED WITH RICHARD, John, and Maynard, and now Dwayne took me to meet a couple of other defendants: his uncle Roger and Leonard Fox. One of the weirder things about the prosecution’s case was the makeup of the group of defendants. Some of them didn’t like one another, and others didn’t even know one another. “We just didn’t associate,” Dwayne said. “I’d seen some of the others around, knew who they were, might have said hello, but we weren’t friends. There’s no way we would have been partying together.” Remarkably, none of the eleven ever offered to roll over on their co-defendants, which even prosecutor Lynn Crooks found odd. “Usually in a trial of this nature,” he told me, “at some point one or more of the guys will say, ‘I didn’t murder him, but Charlie did.’ That didn’t happen here.”
Roger was thirty back in 1983, older than the other local boys, and today still has a stricken look on his face. His mother died while he was in prison, he told me, and he couldn’t go to her funeral. He remembers the night the police burst in to arrest him as his children screamed in terror. Later, he says, the prosecution made him an offer. “If I went along with the government’s theory, they’d release me, give me some money, a place to stay. Change my name if I wanted. I refused. I said, ‘I don’t know what those boys did.’”
Leonard shares Dwayne’s sense of bemusement about the past. Sitting in his trailer with his grandson on his lap, he shook his head at the memory of his six-hour interrogation at the hands of several men, including Yankton. “The stuff they wanted me to say was stupid and crazy. They threatened me with a murder charge if I didn’t become a witness. But I refused.” I asked how they did the questioning. “We were in a little room,” he said, “and they would say, ‘So-and-so said this happened.’ I’d say, ‘Well, no.’ They’d say it again, and I’d repeat my answer. It was a psychological game: They give you the story over and over, so when you’ve heard enough or you want to go home, you tell it the way they told it to you and you sign it.” But why would Yankton frame so many people? Why not just one or two? Leonard theorizes that Yankton never had an elaborate plan for bringing so many people into the story; the numbers just kept expanding. Leonard was Loren Grey Bear’s alibi, so they charged him. Beasley was an alibi for both men, so she was arrested. On it went.
I was struck by how placid the defendants were; they didn’t beat their breasts or get hysterical. Talk to them long enough, though, and you see that they still mourn the things they lost. “Before this happened to me,” Leonard said, “I believed the federal government was good. I was going to be a North Dakota highway patrolman; I even went to the law enforcement training program. But I saw one guy turn the justice system into a shambles.”
The Hearing
IN 1987 ATTORNEY JONATHAN GARAAS, who had taken over Richard’s case, began hearing things from the rez. Beasley was talking; he should go listen. He and four other attorneys drove to Fort Totten, and under oath, Beasley told them her story: She had lied at the trial because James Yankton had threatened to take away her children. He’d also threatened a ten-year sentence for perjury, since she had originally told the grand jury she knew nothing about Eddie’s death. It was her husband, Faron Stensland, who had persuaded her to tell the truth now—that, plus seeing the families of the men she’d helped send away.
After Beasley began talking, others did too—witnesses who not only undercut the prosecution’s case but also portrayed a government that strong-armed witnesses, kept documents from the defense, and abused its subpoena powers to compel witnesses to meet with cops and prosecutors. In 1993 the Eighth Circuit ordered an evidentiary hearing to look into Richard’s and John’s convictions. Forty-five witnesses testified over four days in front of Judge Patrick Conmy. They told of seeing Eddie wearing white painter pants all night, though he was found in blue jeans. They told of being out on Highway 57 just before dawn that morning and seeing no evidence of a massive fight. They told of seeing both James and Quentin Yankton with Eddie that night and morning, of seeing Quentin quarreling and fighting with Eddie, and of being at Celeste Herman’s party. One man said that when Eddie showed up there in the wee hours, James told his brother Quentin not to start any trouble. This witness later passed out on the sidewalk and woke up to find blood nearby. (He told Patrick Springer, of the Forum, that he didn’t testify because he was afraid of the Yanktons: “I wanted to live, you know, so I just didn’t.”) Another witness, Quentin’s estranged wife, also saw Eddie at Celeste’s party; her husband had told her earlier that night, she testified, that he would “kick the shit out of him.”
Gladys Peltier told how she and her late husband, a former BIA cop, had crawled around on their hands and knees at the spot where their son’s body had been found and discovered evidence—including a blood-smeared box from a twelve-pack of light beer and a bloody piece of carpet—that they turned over to Yankton, but it was never seen again (Yankton claimed he’d given it to his boss at the BIA). Victor Peeples, a trusty at the jail, told of being rousted out of his cot by Yankton before the sun came up that morning and ordered to clean out Yankton’s Blazer, which had fresh blood in the back. Peeples, who had cleaned out the Blazer before, noticed that the carpet was gone. Half an hour later, Yankton drove Peeples and another inmate to the crime scene and had them search the area for a pair of glasses and a wallet. Peeples said Yankton had later told him that the blood had come from a deer, though the inmate testified that he’d seen no other evidence of a deer, such as hair or guts.
After Beasley recanted, so did Fred Peltier, who testified that Yankton had previously beaten him up and maced him while he was in jail. Now, he said, Yankton had “threatened that he could get at my parents and my sisters or any member of my family.” He also said Yankton would visit him in Fargo—where he, like Patty and her husband, was being kept in “protective custody” for five months before and during the trial—and give him names of those involved in the fight or other details. After these visits with Yankton, Fred would give the FBI an updated version of his story.
When an attorney asked why the court should believe Fred now, he said, “I realize now that I have to pay whatever price I have to pay, but I want to get the people that actually killed my brother.” Who was that? he was asked. “I believe it’s James Yankton and other people,” he responded.
Conmy had heard enough: Richard and John deserved new trials. The judge hadn’t been too impressed with the recanters; courts are usually skeptical of witnesses who take back testimony. (Prosecutor Crooks still believes they were telling the truth at trial: “I’m a thirty-year prosecutor. I can spot coached, perjured testimony a mile off.”) But Conmy granted the new trials because of the government’s tactics, such as charging witnesses with perjury and then dropping those charges after they had testified for the prosecution. Richard and John, he wrote, “did not, under all the circumstances, receive a fair trial. I believe the government created the very same climate of coercion and fear through its tactics that it thought it was combatting.” It was at this point that the prosecution called Garaas with the plea bargain deal. Richard and John, who had each served eight years in prison, could go free if they confessed. They refused.
More than a year later, the full Eighth Circuit overturned the order for new trials. “Although the government’s tactics may have been heavy-handed,” the court wrote, “they also were above-board . . . The government would have been remiss in failing to bend every effort to vindicate the law by seeking out those responsible for Eddie Peltier’s death.”
Fear and Loathing
DWAYNE AND I DROVE TO FRED’S house and knocked on the door, but there was no answer. On the way back to the car, Dwayne spied a fresh, empty Budweiser can in the grass. “Maybe he’s drinking,” he said. “Some people like to party all the time,” he added, when we were driving again. “Drinking helps them escape from the reality of life on the rez.”
My Library
